Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,103

one. She like near smothered me. I sat right down beside her and cried my eyes out. I said, “Wait’ll you see New York, Jazz, it’s gonna blow you away.”

My own mother was in the kitchen giving me snake eyes. I handed her an envelope with two thousand dollars. She said: “Oh, honey, I knew you’d come good, I just knew it!”

We wanted to drive across country, Jazzlyn and me, but instead we got a skinny dog all the way from Cleveland. The whole time there she slept on my shoulder and sucked her thumb, nine years old and still sucking her thumb. I heard later, in the Bronx, that was one of her things. She liked to suck her thumb when she was doing it with a trick. That makes me sick to the core. I’m a fuck-up and that’s all. That’s about all that matters.

Tillie Fuck-Up Henderson. That’s me without ribbons on.

—

I ain’t gonna kill myself until I see my baby’s baby girls. I told the warden today that I’m a grandmother and she didn’t say nothing. I said, “I want to see my grandbabies—why won’t they bring my grand-babies?” She didn’t bat an eyelid. Maybe I’m getting old. I’ll have my thirty-ninth birthday inside. It’ll take a whole week just to blow them candles out.

I begged her and begged her and begged her. She said the babies were fine, they were being looked after, social services had them.

—

It was a daddy who put me in the Bronx. He called himself L.A. Rex. He didn’t like niggers, but he was a nigger himself. He said Lexington was for whiteys. He said I got old. He said I was useless. He said I was taking too much time with Jazzlyn. He said to me that I looked like a piece of cheese. He said, “Don’t come down by Lex again or I’ll break your arms, Tillie, y’hear me?”

So that’s what he did—he broke my arms. He broke my fingers too. He caught me on the corner of Third and Forty-eighth and he snapped them like they was chicken bones. He said the Bronx was a good place for retirement. He grinned and said it was just like Florida without the beaches.

I had to go home to Jazzlyn with my arms in plaster. I was in convalescence for I don’t know how long.

L.A. Rex had a diamond star in his tooth, that’s no lie. He looked a bit like that Cosby guy on TV, except Cosby has some funky-ass sideburns. L.A. even paid my hospital bills. He didn’t put me out on the stroll. I thought, What the fuck is up with that? Sometimes the world is a place you just can’t understand.

So I got clean. I got myself housing. I gave up the game. Those were good years. All it took to make me happy was finding a nickel in the bottom of my handbag. Things were going so good. It felt like I was standing at a window. I put Jazzlyn in school. I got a job putting stickers on supermarket cans. I came home, went to work, came home again. I stayed away from the stroll. Nothing was going to put me back there. And then one day, out of the blue, I don’t even remember why, I walked down to the Deegan, stuck out my thumb, and looked for a trick. I got a thump in the back of my head from a daddy called Birdhouse—he was wearing a surefire fuck-off hat that he never once took off ’cause he didn’t like anyone to see his glass eye. He said, “Hey, babe, what’s shakin’?”

—

Jazzlyn needed school books. I’m almost sure that’s what it was.

—

I wasn’t a parasol girl down on Forty-ninth and Lex. The parasol was a thing I started in the Bronx. To hide my face, really. That’s a secret I won’t tell nobody. I’ve always had a good body. Even for all those years I stuffed junk into it, it was good and curvy and extra delicious. I never had a disease I couldn’t get rid of. It was when I got to the Bronx that I took up the parasol. They couldn’t see my face but they could see my booty. I could shake it. I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.

In the Bronx I got in the car quick and then they couldn’t say no. Try kicking a girl out of your car unpaid: